As We Try to Heal the Impossible
The picture above has accompanied me for the past few years, as I have temporarily settled to work in different corners of the US. The photo was taken at the end of a class I taught for Livia Negrão’s undergraduate ethnomusicology course in November 2018 at UEPA (State University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil). Here we see around eight of her students wrapped in a circle. They are at the center and focal point of the image. In the background, there is a more elevated stage and a screen near the back wall, where the sentence “Nós nos formamos nesses contrários” (we are educated in these opposites) is projected in white font to a black background. Negrão, a professor of ethnomusicology, researcher, and an inspiring educator, took this photograph as some of her students gave me a collective hug (suggested by her). At the time, I was in Belém doing my PhD research. The image has been blurred for publication here.
My dissertation work, completed in 2021, was broadly concerned with the storytelling of listening as an entry point for understanding violent and transformative processes taking place in Amazonian territories in the state of Pará in the name of development. This work took shape through interpersonal relations, knowledge exchanges, and moments of mutual education such as the one in the class pictured above. Here, I highlight the role that affective-intellectual encounters, such as the one with Negrão and her students, have in the process of grounding ourselves in active hope while navigating a world of growing neofascist sensibilities.
“Nós nos formamos nesses contrários” (We are educated in these opposites), the sentence I projected on the black screen that day, was a quote from Negrão’s words to that same group of students in a class the week before. I was there then to listen. Throughout the semester, she took her students to witness and participate in local popular cultural expressions, always ensuring a grounded connection with the living knowledge of that territory—as an educator who, as she herself said, “since the beginning, never did anything alone.” In Portuguese the word “formação” refers both to “education” and “formation”—as the act of gaining or giving form. The word “contrários”—which may be translated as “opposites” or “contraries”—emphasizes difference, disagreement, conflict, and contradiction. Negrão’s phrasing emphasized how engaging with contradictions and differences is crucial to our learning process and how we are also educated by being in oppositional relations to each other and the worlds we share (and don’t). That phrasing had a particular weight at that time. In November 2018 we had just gone through the Brazilian presidential elections in which the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro was elected president for the upcoming four years. There was a great deal of polarization in the streets (and classrooms), in many ways foreshadowing the series of fraught moments to come. We knew that the upcoming government would attack the public education system and the work of educators. Among the proposals most repeated by the president-elect during his campaign was “purging Paulo Freire’s ideology”—the same Freire whose words were also painted on the walls of UEPA.
I was invited to visit and eventually teach in Negrão’s class after a month of relationship- and trust-building with her. We met on a very rainy evening of October 16, 2018, thanks to her cousin and partner, both friends of a close friend from Rio. From the day we first met, we saw each other a few more times in cultural and political activities. After learning that I was renting a room in the house of a Bolsonaro supporter who was boycotting me, Negrão invited me to stay at her house for the remainder of my time in the city. And there I stayed for a month, where, between conversations over açaí, banana porridge, tapioca, cake, and coffee, we processed the world together, and she generously shared her deep knowledge about Amazonian popular traditions, carimbó, listening, learning from the living world of music, and spirituality.
In the class I taught in November at UEPA, I shared reflections from my ongoing research. I arrived in Belém by boat, coming from Alter do Chão, Santarém, a village in the same state of Pará, in October of that year. Alter do Chão, the land of the Borari people who still struggle for its demarcation, is located on the bank of the Tapajós River—a river impacted by mining since the 1970s—and near the expanding agricultural frontier of the Santareno Plateau. The village has become a major tourist destination as a river balneary, promoting the experience of "nature" to tourists from Brazil and abroad, and exemplifying the ways in which gentrification, development, and devastation have been shaping the region over the past decades. During my time listening to histories of listening there, and in closer dialogue with those responsible for the religious part of the Çairé festival (a yearly folkloric-religious celebration for the Holy Spirit), I learned about igarapés that were no longer sounding, loud musical tunes that accompanied the construction of fenced houses, the odd concentration of birds in areas of the village, new music genres occupying the streets of the Santarém region—along with the intensification of soy monoculture and the activities of the Cargill port—among other stories (Fantinato-Siqueira 2019). If “senses make place and places make sense,” as in Feld’s theorization of listening and sounding as sensory ways of knowing, or “acoustemology” (1996; 2015), then how is one to combine listening as place-making with the storytelling of loss, which is frequent in contexts of devastation?
It is one thing to listen and write about what we listen to and another to share what we’ve learned in a classroom with students who have varied ties to that land and are interested in experimenting with such ideas and practices. Belém is the capital of the state of Pará and a densely populated urban center, located a significant distance by land from Alter do Chão, but there were connections between the processes happening in these different places. Through questions and listening exercises, I invited students to think-feel about how the materiality of cities and places we live in is shaped by sonic displacements, erasures, and sonic mobilities that interrupt other sounds and modes of living. I still remember the sad look on a student’s face after doing a listening activity on campus, where all she heard was the sound of ACs. “It was not like this before”, said Negrão. “I used to listen to birds”.
From the start of my research in the Brazilian Amazon, I was haunted by the perception that much of the devastation occurring in the territories I encountered was also linked to decisions made far away—often not only outside the country but also in other regions within Brazil. Through its internal colonialism, the Brazil in which I grew up—the southeastern region—'modernized’ while turning its back on the Amazon, all the while remaining deeply dependent on it. I was born into this wound in which “Brazil,” as a nation-state and locus of violence and contradictions, is constantly reiterated; the wound that makes the Amazon inside and outside the country; and the wound that reaffirms the need for national and neoliberal extractivist projects to constantly deny ways of life (throughout the country) that take the lands, waters, territory, and belonging seriously as part of life. I conceive of my research and pedagogical work as a process of thinking-feeling from my alienation and fraught belonging to these lands and as an effort to connect with them through interpersonal relationships and partial (imperfect) dialogues of knowledge. Encounters such as this one with Negrão and her students were a crucial part of that process. They are part of a journey of trying to heal the impossible—as a process and not a final goal.
Teaching can be a mode of striving to think from the land we step on. The picture of that hug is a reminder that the consistency we search for in our thinking-feeling depends on the physical work of being close to each other as we learn through disagreement (which is easier said than done). To bring back Paulo Freire, dialogue is the encounter between people, “mediated by the world, in order to name the world.” (2018: 88). During this time in Belém, a city to which I would return a few months later, the dialogue with Negrão helped shape a sense that my thinking-feeling belonged to a world we shared and were at the same time attempting to create together. At the time, Negrão was closing a cycle of work and dedication at UEPA, and getting ready to move to São Paulo, in the country’s southeast region. On the other hand, I, coming from Rio, in the same southeast region, was just beginning to grasp the real core of my research in Pará. Negrão’s ethnomusicology course was a culmination of her trajectory there, and I knew that when I returned to Belém, she would no longer be there. But this encounter (and ongoing friendship) taught me that affective and intellectual exchange can produce forms of belonging where one can be held and had by place, even if momentarily.
Fantinato-Siqueira, Maria. (2019) “Sobre pássaros, estradas e contradições: questões político-sonoras e territorialidades cambiantes em uma vila amazônica.” In. Ponto Urbe (24).
Feld, Steven (1996) “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” In. Senses of Place. School of American Research Press.;
______. (2015) “Acoustemology.” In: David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds). Keywords in Sound. Durham and London: Duke University Press [12-21].
Freire, Paulo (2018) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Ramos M B. 50th Anniversary Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Maria Fantinato G. Siqueira is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Reed College. They are an interdisciplinary scholar of sound and music, focusing on how struggles for land and territory permeate everyday life and shape modes of listening, sounding, and storytelling in the Brazilian Amazon. As a scholar and educator, Maria is interested in the multiple ways people engage with their environments and how knowledge travels from one listening, sounding, and singing experience to another. Maria holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, as well as an M.A. in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Before coming to Reed, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her work has been published in The World of Music journal, the Brazilian Urban Anthropology journal Ponto Urbe, and others. In the 2024-2025 academic year, they will be teaching classes on sound, music, and climate change; the cultural study of music; sensorial imaginaries of the Amazon; musical ethnography; and feminist approaches to popular music.
This page was last updated on 3 February 2025